ORIGIN OF APOLLO 13 QUOTE :
"FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION."

[Among those pictured above during the Apollo 13 rescue are:
Glynn Lunney (lower left), Bill Tindall (seated beside
Mr. Lunney with his chin in his hand), Christopher Kraft (standing
beside Mr. Tindall with cigar in left hand), and Jerry
Bostick (wearing a sportscoat and tie and
looking over Tindall's right shoulder)]

Origin of "Failure is not an option."

Among the great quotes of manned space are: "Godspeed, John Glenn",
"Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.", "One
small step for (or: a) man, one giant step for all mankind", "Houston,
we've had (or: we have) a problem", and "Failure
is not an option." I've often wondered about the origin of the latter
quote. Recently, an e-mail from a friend, Jerry Bostick, who
contributed significantly to the success of the movie APOLLO 13
detailed the story. Jerry, as one of the key flight controllers
responsible for the rescue, served as a technical advisor for the movie.
Jerry's son Mike worked for Ron Howard as a co-producer of APOLLO 13.
It was Mike who suggested Mr. Howard acquire the rights to Apollo 13's
Commander Jim Lovell's best selling book: LOST MOON, the story of the
Apollo 13 mission. Here is the account of the origin of "FAILURE IS NOT AN
OPTION" with regard to APOLLO 13, the movie:

As far as the expression 'Failure is not an option", you are correct that
Kranz never used that term. In preparation for the movie, the
script writers, Al Reinart and Bill Broyles, came down to Clear Lake
to interview me on "What are the people in Mission Control really like?"
One of their questions was "Weren't there times when everybody, or
at least a few people, just panicked?" My answer was "No, when bad
things happened, we just calmly laid out all the options, and
failure was not one of them. We never panicked, and we never
gave up on finding a solution." I immediately sensed that Bill
Broyles wanted to leave and assumed that he was bored with the
interview. Only months later did I learn that when they got in
their car to leave, he started screaming, "That's it! That's the
tag line for the whole movie, Failure is not an option. Now we
just have to figure out who to have say it." Of course, they
gave it to the Kranz character, and the rest is history.

Your observations about the actual mission and how it affected your
faith are very interesting, because I, too, became an even stronger
believer during and after the mission. My first "religious" experience
during a mission was on Apollo 8 when they first came around from the
back side of the moon the first time at the exact second we had
predicted. I teared up and told my colleagues, "This just proves that
someone is in charge who knows a lot more about orbital mechanics
than any of us."